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Originally Posted by karomesis
there are, of course, variables which need to be statistically accounted for before a summation of the data can be made such as; per capita crime rate, socioeconomic status, race, and others that are "controversial". It is a well known fact that blacks commit more violent crime per capita that other races in the united states, is this "controversial"? why? because of race? is it not a well known fact that races are different? isn't that why they are called "races?
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They are slightly different, sure, but that doesn't mean those differences necessarily account for things like level of violence. There are interim causes here. Poor people are more involved in crime, and blacks on general are more poor, so blacks are more involved in crime. This is not necessarily some genetic thing related to their race... The right way to check and see if the race is the cause would be to compare groups of blacks and whites of the same socio-economic status. I am not aware of any such studies and would be interesting to see if they find a difference.
Assuming that it's simply a matter of "races being different" is very very dangerous. It would imply that someone is more prone to violence solely because he was born into a certain ethnic group, something which he has zero control of and will never be able to change. I do believe it's callled racism?
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Originally Posted by karomesis
There is also an unfortunate occurence called the "cinderella effect" by evolutionary psychologists that says stepparents will not treat their stepchildren as well as their own children and will treat them with less than favorable affection. Statistics prove this as well, determining that step children are up to 40x more likely to be mistreated and killed by a stepparent than by a bilogical parent.
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Again, that statistic isn't really surprising, if you consider some of the interim causes involved here. I don't know about other countries, but here the state encourages families to adopt children by offering monetary incentives. It's more than possible that some of these families adopt the children, at least partially because of financial reasons and not out of true commitment. What's more, adopted children, especially those adopted at an older age (though not only), maybe more likely to have behavioral problems (no fault of theirs perhaps, given the poor start in life), hence bring about a less favorable treatment from the adopting parents. Just thoughts here, not saying this is the case, only that you need to treat researches with a grain of salt and look at them in a critical way.